


Unknowing Innocence

by smileybagel



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, De-Aged Handsome Jack, Eridium Withdrawal, Gen, Imagined Murder, Trauma, de-aged character, mentioned animal abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 16:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6431812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smileybagel/pseuds/smileybagel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>her father is twelve years old and he burns like the sun, ready to explode into a supernova at the drop of a hat</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>written for the april fool's switcharoo thing on tumblr, so I'll be cross-posting this onto my art blog lmao</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unknowing Innocence

There's a snarl and a startled gasp, ignored protests and warnings from the guards surrounding them, and then a blast powered by slag and Angel's siren outburst.

The resulting smoke is thick and heavy in the air, lingering like a fog in the early morning. Angel gasps and starts choking as she attempts to crawl away from the source of the smoke, but the faulty tech that caused the blast is all around her, and the cables hooked into her head burn with the loose energy spilling forth. Suddenly, there's a pair of hands on her head, holding her down as they make quick work in disconnecting the cables. When the sockets come loose, Angel gasps and falls forward onto her hands, the shock of being detached proving to be too much stimuli coupled with the explosion. 

She takes this moment to survey the room, quickly taking note of the unconscious (possibly dead) guardsmen and the red lights signalling a lockdown, before spinning around to confront whoever disconnected her from her Eridium supply.

The siren blinks, the boy blinks back, hands on his hips and lips curled into an unimpressed frown as he stares down at her from his standing position.

His eyes were brighter, his face chubby with baby fat, and there was no scar or mask hiding his face, but Angel knew. Angel knew from the blue of his right eye and the expression on his face that this young child was her father.

The smoke dissipates slowly, and after the boy deems his survey of Angel satisfactory, he sits down in front of her without care, crossing his legs and his arms as he continues to stare her down.

"Ya jus' gonna stare all day, or are you gonna thank the guy who saved you?"

"I'm sorry-  _ what _ ?" Comes Angels' oh-so intelligent reply. The siren is still shell-shocked from the blast, and she can feel the effects of her Eridium withdrawal starting ever so slowly. The cables lay a few feet away from her, behind the slight frame of her father-turned-child. Angel swallows heavily. 

" _ Me _ , are you gonna thank  _ me _ for taking those scary lookin' wires out of your head?"  _ Jack _ , she supposes, taps the side of head with his fingers, and Angels takes in how  _ unruly _ the boy's hair is. No wonder why Jack uses so much hair product, Angel thinks to herself. "They were pumping some gross-lookin' purple stuff into you."

"I- It's not  _ gross _ ," Angel's hands fly up to cover the ports on the side of her skull, shame causing her cheeks to flush. Jack reaches out to pry her hands away, tongue sticking out between his lips, a gesture she's seen her father do when he concentrates. 

The familiarity of the gesture makes her flinch, as does the boy's proximity to her. The child rears back as if burned, eyes wide with surprise before realization covers his face. It lasts for a second before his expression morphs into one of pure rage. 

"Who hurt you?" He asks, tiny fists balling up in his lap, mismatched eyes narrowed and bright with fury. " _ Who hurt you?! _ " 

Angel bites back a whine and worries her lip between her teeth, hands automatically coming up to shield herself. It's  _ stupid _ , she knows, this boy in front of her is but a  _ faint _ shadow of the person Handsome Jack is, but she cannot help her reflexive instinct when it comes to his tone, no matter how young his voice sounds. 

"You don't...know?" Angels questions hesitantly, fighting the tears that threaten to fall. The boy looks at her like she's crazy, and she thinks she just might be. Perhaps the explosion knocked her unconscious and this is a just a fever dream. 

" _ No. _ " He bites back, though his voice doesn't hold as much venom as it did before, having noticed how poorly she reacted. "Should I?"

“You really don’t know?” Angel asks again, ignoring the sick feeling that churns in her stomach. “Do you- Do you even know where you are right now?”

Jack shakes his head  _ no, _ and Angel feels something like hysteria creeping into her skin. 

She looks at the boy sitting across from her and takes in everything, but the shade of his hair to the expression on his young, boyish face. He’s just a  _ child,  _ and he does not know the horror he has inflicted upon the world. He doesn’t know what he’s done, who he’s killed, or the havoc he’s wreaked on his own  _ daughter.  _

Angels clenches her fists in her lap and swallows. 

He probably doesn’t know about the fail safes in the room, she thinks, only to be activated in a worst case scenario, i.e.  _ she rebels against Handsome Jack. _

She could wrap her hands around his throat and just  _ squeeze  _ until his short legs stopped kicking, until the blood ran from his face and the air leaves his lungs. Angel feels a cold sweat on her skin, and looks at the cables again.

Or, she thinks, she could take a page from Handsome Jack’s book and  _ strangle  _ the boy without getting her hands dirty. Or better yet, sprint to one of the downed guards and take their rifles and  _ fire and fire _ until the boy was nothing more than a bloody puddle of gore on the ground.

Angel looks at the child and imagines the life leaving his face on second at a time, and then she dry heaves, tears prickling at her eyes. 

She’d be no better than  _ him _ if she did any of that. 

“You never answered my question.” Angel snaps out of her daze and wipes her mouth free of spit, looking at the boy with equal parts fear and hate. 

“My father.” She finally answers, resisting the urge to yell and scream and  _ destroy  _ the boy in front of her. “My father did this.”

“Kill him.” Comes his response, spilling freely from his lips with no remorse. “That’s what I’m gonna do to my ol’ gran when I get older. Gonna do it with her favorite buzzaxe, too.”

Angel’s heart hammers in chest and her vision begins to swim, the effects of her withdrawal increasing. 

“Buzzaxe?” 

“Same one she uses on me whenever I’ve been bad or whatever, I don’t know. Old crone’s off her fu-  _ friggin’   _ rocker.” Jack hooks his hands around his shins as he sits, legs still crossed beneath him, and rocks back a little bit to take in the ceiling of the bunker. “S’okay though. I found a stray cat the other day, poor thing’s pretty friendly and gran was in a good mood so I got to keep her. Makes my day better when I see her on my bed.”

She’s heard this before, she thinks, nonchalantly mentioned and recorded on an ECHO by her father. Drowned and left on his bed, she recalls, and feels sick to her stomach.

Whether it’s from the boy’s story or her withdrawals or a combination of the two, Angel doesn’t know, but her head feels like cement. She clutches at the ports again, her other hand weakly reaching out to the cables on the floor.  _ Too far, too far.  _

“Hey- Hey!” Jack calls out, catching her by the wrist. “You don’t need that. It looks like  _ poison _ , it’s gonna make you  _ sick.”  _ He pulls her away and kicks out his leg, moving the cables further from Angel. She whines in his hold, too far gone to attempt proper speech, but  _ oh  _ does she want to  _ scream  _ and  _ spit  _ in this boy’s face. He doesn’t even  _ know,  _ she thinks with the last bit of coherency she has, he doesn’t even know what he’s done as a  _ man  _ and yet he still hurts her as a  _ boy.  _

The last thing she see before she passes out is Jack’s young, bright face looking down at her as she lays in his lap, and she hears him say,

“ _ I’ll keep you safe, don’t worry. I’ll protect you. _ ”

* * *

When she wakes, the cables are plugged into her ports again and a bed has been brought into the bunker for her to lay on. Angel groans softly, enough to alert the man next to her, and she weakly stirs on the mattress.

“Oh hey, princess, welcome back to the land of the living! You had me scared there, baby girl.” Handsome Jack looms over her bed, lips spread wide in a feral grin. “We lost a  _ lot  _ of time after your little outburst, Angel. Gotta work harder!” 

She opens her mouth to speak, to ask him if he remembers  _ anything,  _ if he knows how he changed or  _ reverted back,  _ she wants to  _ know- _

“Those stupid friggin’ Vault Hunters have been getting closer, cupcake, and I need that Vault Key charged like _ , yesterday. _ We’re gonna up your Eridium dosage just a bit.”

Angel wants to scream, and she wonders how much effort it really would have been to wrap the cables around the boy’s throat. 


End file.
